Little Gods: How a Dangerous Doctrine Shaped Charismatic Theology

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my co-host and friend, Chen O'Ross, pastor and the voice of the understanding scripture and truth by Chen O'D Ross YouTube channel.

Chen O'Ross, I am a little bit excited about today's episode. We talked briefly about what it was. This is the first that I'd heard what you were going to talk about today and you don't know this but interestingly what you're talking about right now is exactly a theme that we're going through with John McKinnon and the he does the series on weaponized religion which is a lot of William Branham history but it's also tying into themes that I'm researching for parts of what will be my next book. We're talking about the Little God's idea and

it ties into so many things that we've talked about. It ties to the manifested sons of God, it ties to the Joel's army theme, it ties to the word of faith movement and people see all of these different things and they you know they've attributed many of those doctrines to different individuals who had loose connections to latter reign but I don't think that they went far enough to get back into its foundation and and when I'm saying foundation I'm talking about the the point at which they were all linked into one doctrine. You can go back

to Phineas Quimbee and you can find word of faith. You can you can go back to different sources but William Branham introduced this idea which was so far off the mark if you're a Christian and understand the Bible. He took the text from John one where it says in the beginning was the word the word was with God the word was God. Well Branham's theology as it began to morph into spiritualism and the manifested sons of God. He started to say that in the beginning Jesus was nothing more than a thought in the Father's mind and when the word was

spoken the thought became expressed and the thought was manifested so the human well actually less than a human. He claimed that Jesus had no mother so it wasn't quite a human. This vessel called Jesus became a thought expressed which was spoken word and became a living God among the people and he started to build upon this and he started to bring forward what eventually would warp morph into the doctrine that you're going to talk about today.

but I'm deep into the study of that history because I'm really interested to know what they were trying to do with the minds of the children and the political reasons behind that. So I have way more to say than I can fit into this one podcast, but I'm interested to hear what you have to say, and I'll try to contain myself. Well, you know, my only level of expertise in any of this really has to do with what Dr. Freeman's teaching and views were. So as I get into it, I'm always curious to hear what you have to say because I'm always curious how much of this came through William

Brannum to him. And I'm sure a lot of it did. So yeah, I said what I'd like to talk about today is maybe for a lack of a better phrase, although I can think of some other ones, but I have seen this used by some of these W-O-F, the word of faith ministers, and it is called the little gods theology or the little gods teaching. This is something Hobart definitely believed in and definitely taught.

And the verse they use will just jump ahead and say it's over in John's gospel, but it's in I think John chapter 10 where Jesus is actually talking to the religious leaders, arguing his case, and he quotes a passage from the book of Psalms. And he said, doesn't your own law, your own book say that ye are little gods? I think that's John 1034. So it's an unusual verse for sure. It's an unusual quotation of the Old Testament, but as I will argue for all of my life, Hobart didn't understand any of the things he talked about. He was a cherry picker. He was a proof-texture. I'm sure he had

heard the basis of this teaching from people that came before him. I'm positive of that. And then he just, as any second or third generation believer of something, he just refines it or purifies it or makes it worse and adds his own interpretations to it. But what this theology teaches is that, and this is what Hobart taught, and we've got several examples. We're going to play some clips from him today where people can hear for themselves, for themselves what he's saying.

He taught that Jesus did all of his miracles as a man. He did them as the man Jesus and not as the son of God. So in other words, this one person, Jesus Christ, who had two natures, all of historic Orthodox Christianity has believed that there was one divine person who had a human nature and a divine nature. The human nature came through his mother, Mary, and the divine nature came through miraculous conception of him in her womb by the Holy Spirit.

And so these miracles and his faith and all of these incredible outstanding things that Jesus did that are recorded in the gospels, spring from his human nature and had nothing to do with his divine nature.

They'll also go over to Philippians 2, the so-called Kenosis passage, where it said that Jesus emptied himself. And again, I just want to remind all of our listeners that these are difficult heavyweight passages, and there are volumes and volumes which have been written on the Kenosis, K-E-N-O-S-I-S experience in Philippians 2.

So I'm fine listening to a charismatic preacher, tell me what he thinks it says. I'm fine listening to it, but I'm highly doubtful that he's going to know what that passage is saying simply because theologians have worked for centuries trying to understand what's being said.

What is it that we actually have in the one person of Christ who had two natures, the only person in history like that, one person with two natures. When I was in seminary, I went to seminary in the mid-80s at Gordon Conwell, theological seminary outside of Boston, and I'll never forget.

I had a night class, and the reason I took this particular class was because of the professor, and it was Dr. Roger Nicole, who was in the mid to late 20th century, just one of the leading evangelical conservative theologians.

He was a gruff, a Swiss trained theologian, but he was teaching there in Massachusetts, and he had an evening class called the Person of Christ, which dealt with the early and various heresies, where the early heretics in the first few centuries AD were trying to put too much emphasis on the human side, or too much on the divine side, and it was a very, very interesting class, and I loved sitting under Dr. Nicole for that.

What Hobart said is that the way that Jesus could do his miracles with his human nature was by the power of the Holy Spirit. And as I'm trying to say, I don't know any orthodox theologian in the church's history, that would explain things this way.

One thing we need to keep in mind is that whatever you want to ascribe to his human nature, and that this is not the place to discuss that theological death, but whatever you want to ascribe to that, we've got to remember Jesus had a perfect, sinless human nature.

So even what he did, if you could prove it from Scripture simply by virtue of human nature, with no divine nature involved, we don't have a perfect human nature. But Hobart, as he would talk about this, would use the John 1034 passage, would use the Philippians too, and then we'd just go to passages where Jesus would do something like walk on the water, and then when Peter failed, he would rebuke Peter and say, you know, why couldn't you do what I did?

But Hobart never taught any type of thorough, in-depth theological understanding, bringing together all of the related passages, exegiting them correctly, explaining them in their context. He never did that for anything. He knew the Bible, he knew the King James translation of the Bible well, and by that I mean he read his Bible a lot, which is good, which is what we should all do.

We should all read our Bible, we should all know passages, as well as Dr. Freeman knew them. I think I know a lot of passages, but I think that we need to refrain from trying to string them together like I've said before, like popcorn on a string to feed the birds in the fall.

One thing that I do know is that the reason Hobart Freeman was teaching this, I know exactly why he was teaching this, and that is so that we now can imitate Jesus. He has removed all obstacles for any type of miraculous thing being done by us, he's removed the obstacles by ascribing all of Jesus' miracles to his human nature.

Said, didn't have anything to do with him being God. It only had to do with Jesus being filled with Holy Spirit, empowered by the Holy Spirit, and then through his human nature, he trusted God.

He had faith in his father above, and by teaching it this way, what Hobart is trying to do is remove any objections we have to say, well, I can't do that. That was Jesus, the son of God, who did that.

No, the little God's teaching says that Jesus did that through his human side. And so now, what does that tell us? Well, we're all humans. We don't have a divine nature. We're all humans.

So we can work the same kinds of miracles. So I've got one clip, John, if you could play this. It's from a message done at the glory barn in the mid-1970s, and that's when most of these were done.

Mid-1970s, it was on a tape entitled, increasing our faith. And it's in the very beginning of this message from the two-minute and 16-second-time mark to the three-minute and 51-second-time mark. Jesus had perfect... Faith. So all things were available to him. He didn't carry his money around in a wallet.

His possessions on a camel caravan. When he needed food, he multiplied the loaves and fishes. When he needed wine at the wedding feast, he turned water into wine. When he needed to pay tax money, he told Peter to go fishing, fishing, word of knowledge. And so his faith, you see, could spend like money, could heal like medicine, could deliver like an army. And faith is a key to receiving what he's provided promised us. He had perfect faith and he tells you in Luke 640 that he wants you to be like him. Now he told me that directly to tell you, but he's already

said it in his word. He told me to get into the gospels because there is the way I would see how he ministered. He said he ministered as a prophet. Said this to me in total faith. Said that's how I ministered in total faith. I had to believe myself in his humanity. He said, I'm calling you to the same type minister that I had a minister of total faith. And then you and Turner to tell the people they are to believe in total faith. Now if you read Luke 640, and by the way, that only works if

you believe what it just said, if you say, oh, well, that's just him saying that, then it isn't going to work for you. But I wouldn't have to say that to you. It's already in the word Luke 640.

He that is perfect, Jesus said, will be like me, like his master. So it's an interesting story that Hobart tells. And you know, what we hear or what we've just heard there is that when Jesus was traveling about in Galilee and his earthly ministry, he didn't have to take any money with him.

He didn't carry any food with him. Why? Because he just could work miracles. When it came time to pay his taxes, you know, he didn't have to budget or save up any money for taxes. He just used the gift of the word of knowledge and told them, go catch your fish and the first fish that you hook, pull him up. And when you pull him up, open his mouth. And in his mouth, you'll find a coin and go and pay your taxes with that. Can you imagine what this kind of teaching does in the minds of the people? They're not dummies. Well, maybe some of them were. But they're not

supposed to be dummies. They heard Hobart say, we are supposed to operate in our life in ministry the same way Jesus did. Jesus went out without any money or food. And when he needed food, he just created food. When he needed food to feed the people around him, 5,000, 4,000, he just created the food. He didn't need money. He just go fishing. And when you catch a fish, there's your tax money right in there. How many people...

people I wonder have tried this. I mean, you should try it because Hobart said that this is biblical, that we're little gods and ye are does not your own scripture. Do they not say you are a little Jesus?

You are a little God. So if Jesus could go do that and he does it all by the power of his human nature, then just look what that opens up as far as possibilities for us.

When we travel in ministry, you don't have to carry any extra money, you don't have to carry food. You can simply work miracles. Now, someone out there may be saying, well, there's, I mean, that's ridiculous.

There is no way that Hobart meant that. Well, you listen to the clip again yourself. And in the context of his teaching, you can listen to all of it increasing our faith. In the context of what we're saying in this little God's theology, I don't know where else you can go, but we're little gods.

Jesus did it with his human nature. We have the human nature. Therefore, we can go do it ourselves. One of the reasons why I've been focused on this particular doctrine of recent, I've had multiple guests talking about recent events where this doctrine is, or at least Brannum's version of this doctrine is beginning to surface in political pseudo-religious context.

And if you understand what they're trying to say, it's deeply tied to the dominionism. If you can become God, well, you can re-face the earth, repurpose the earth. And that's literally what they're trying to do today through politics and religion.

But the way that Brannum twisted this doctrine, literally twisted the gospel. He rewrote the DNA of the gospel. Like you said, Jesus was in the way that this doctrine presents Jesus, it's a manifested sun.

They always go back to what Brannum did. He always went back to the phrase, he was the son of man. And do you know who the son of man is? He would use that phrase to try to say, son of man, if you interpret it, it just means son of Adam, it means human.

And so he's trying to say that. But what the biblical text, if you understand the history of that phrase, it's also used for the prophets. And so when Jesus was using it, he was trying to present the idea that he was a prophet, but he was more than a prophet.

He was divine. And the way that this little God's theology twists it, it's that he was just a human. He was just like you and I, but he became the manifested son of God.

And with this prophet status, now he became the greatest manifested son of God. So in the hierarchy of manifested sons of God, he's at the top. Until today, and that's interesting because the until today became a theme in the latter reign Branham would say things and I'm Multiple of these men said it. I've heard it from others But he would say things like Jesus had a limited number of miracles in his ministry look how many we've had today We've had more miracles in my ministry than Jesus did on the plate face of the planet. That was a phrase

I'm paraphrasing, but that was a quote from Branham What he's trying to say is you too can be a manifested son of God, especially if you're in leadership And you have the power to bring down heaven on earth Therefore if you follow it out to its logical conclusion you are Jesus walking on earth And in 1965 William Branham after convincing all of his following that he was the return of Elijah the prophet He was a manifested son of God. He was the supreme manifested son of God He said the the Elijah of today is Jesus Christ not a man

But God in the form of a prophet that was his words in 1965 So he had become more than a little god. He was king little god And that's what's so interesting about this doctrine It isn't that you can become a god and you can be equal with the leader who's presenting it It's that you're in a hierarchy of gods There's one at the top. There's one in the middle. There's one at the bottom You're going to be the one at the bottom And John Wow Don't all of these ministers. Hobart never went that far. I mean what you just described is definitely what this teaching was all about

We are little gods. He never would go He never said the things that you just said that Branham said but we have given clips of Hobart before where did he not say that God had given the Full in time message of faith whatever that is to one man And he said well That's enough. I want the rest of itself explanatory. Well, he was obviously talking about himself It seems like every one of these goofballs Who ends up with any kind of you know big following They they all end up thinking that they're the one. You know, you're the one you're finally the one

And surely he knew that people before him felt they were the one You know, I look at stuff like that. I look at time I look at these people who predict the date of the second advent and of course Met so many people have predicted and it comes and goes and then What makes us think all of a sudden today now? Oh, no, I know they were all they they predict it and they were all wrong But I know the day I mean just just history would tell you if you ever had the thought in your mind that you might know the date

You need to go hang yourself don't really do that you need to go hit yourself in the face and say don't dare believe that. I mean, so it's the same situation if any minister were ever tempted to think I might be the one.

All you got to do is look at all the people before you who thought they were the one and look at what happened to all of them. You know, William Brandham dies in a car collision, right?

In the end of 1965, and Hobart dies a much more painful and worse death than that. So yes, don't copy these guys. And anyway, this teaching, this little God's teaching, you can trace it back all during the late 60s.

It was being taught by other people. All during the 70s, it was being taught by people, people like, well, the whole word of faith, a group of people, Jerry Sevelle, Marilyn Hickey, Billy Joe Dority, of course, Kenneth Hague, and Kenneth Copeland was probably the biggest teacher of it at all, because he just constantly talked about we're little gods, and God says, I'm a God, and I'm God, and he does all of this stuff.

And people are just, I mean, they're so, they're just fascinated with Kenneth Copeland's stage persona. He just, all of a sudden takes on this deep baritone voice, like that somehow makes him more of a God than he was when he talked at a higher octave, and then he'll just say, I am a God, because, and don't you think that's heresy, because God said, I'm a God, I'm a God, and you're a God.

And I don't think he has any hope of understanding. I mean, he knows no more about John 1034 than Miss Jumpers, my cat back here. He literally knows no more about it. It's not an easy verse to interpret.

We should all start with the fact that there are some things in the Bible easier, and there are some harder, and that's actually not one of the really hard ones, but it's not one you can just go to and say, Oh, he said, year gods, that means I'm God.

That just means I'm God. No, there's more to it than that. And I think it really actually is traced back to E.W. Kingyan. E.W. Kingyan had a whole lot to say about this, and what's interesting about Kingyan, he, you know, Hagen was a big follower of Kingyan, what's interesting about E.W. Kingyan, is that he also was maybe more or less the father of the Jesus died spiritually, heresy, something that Hobart rightly taught against and hated, and yet Hobart is believing this little God's theology teaching that came from...

E. W. E. Kenyon, but he's very much opposed to Kenyon whenever it comes to Jesus-dye spiritually. I don't even know if Hobart knows. I just think that he heard that teaching in the late 60s when he became charismatic.

I don't know the exact source for Hobart hearing it the first time, but it was being taught then by Kenneth Hagen. It was coming through the writings of E. W. Kenyon. Hobart was just devouring all of the charismatic literature on the market, anything he could find.

He was either listening to on a recorded cassette tape or if it's a book, he's buying and reading. And he's trying to jettison most of his brethren and baptism, Southern Baptist theology because he's just welcoming in all of this new charismatic understanding.

And along with that come some dangerous things like this little god theology. In mathematics you have the value of pi, which in its simplest form is 3.14, but you can carry it out to 15 digits, 50 digits, 5,000 digits as far as you want to go.

I look at this doctrine much the same as pi because whenever Hobart Freeman had it, it might be 3.14. It might be this little tiny number, but if you follow it out to its logical conclusion, I think the reason why it didn't get so far is what Branham had.

Hobart Freeman died younger than he could have lived. Had he got medication and got doctrine. Whenever you're a stage persona in this mindset that ye are gods, you enter into a stage persona, every time you enter out onto the platform.

And there is a psychological effect that happens. You start to believe what you think you are on stage, and that separates from the reality of who you are when you're off stage, which is fascinating and interesting to me.

But you mentioned Kenyan, so FF Bosworth, who was in the Dowie extremist cult, he was a studyer of Kenyan and he published many thoughts and quotes that Kenyan had. In fact, I think his book Christ the Healer, I think at the end of it, he attributes a lot of it to Kenyan.

And he mentored Branham, so Branham's teaching it, neither one can claim ownership of it, but what they did, each person that teaches this doctrine, it's such a warped, twisted mentality that you have to enter into to even believe it in the first place, that you start to wire into the doctrine, your own weird beliefs that are the conclusions you come to when you first understand the doctrine.

And so each person who's building upon another person's version of the doctrine, they think they have some source of truth that they discovered while their mind was literally getting warped, but essentially it comes down to this, and the irony.

The irony is... many people who are of this mindset will condemn the children for reading Harry Potter books. But yet the elements building to this, so one of the elements faith is a force.

Branum used to teach faith as a substance and he would quote that passage and then totally destroy what the passage meant with regards to faith. It's a literal substance not understanding the language of the ancients, right, or the Queen's English. But faith was meant to be a force just like it is in sorcery. Words create reality. It's part of the, you know, the word of faith movements theology now. But before that it was Branum's spoken word. So Hobart was building upon that. Just the system of theology that was used, each building block is taking something

biblical and twisting and rewriting the DNA of it to be more of sorcery than it is of Christianity. And as a little god, you are essentially, if you follow it out to its logical conclusion, you become little sorcerers. They're talking about things that you can speak into existence or things that you can command realities. You can even walk up to somebody and if they're having a bad day, you can force your opinion on the way that they should think about their day and they should accept it. And I recently had another person who was a podcast I'm doing with Christian.

We were talking about in Germany, the book, the secret became very popular in Germany, much like it did here a few years back. But it's that idea that you can control things by forcing your mind upon it. Your mind is a force. Your belief is a force. Your faith is a force. And you can sway opinions. You literally become not little gods, but little sorcerers who's using your mind to conquer demons. That's what it becomes. Well, Hobart was just part of a system. It's not that he went to Brannum and studied. What does Brannum teach on this? He was part of a system where men were

being trained to believe this. And that's part of where I'm working through in the research right now because when Brannum died, in fact, I don't know if I've showed you this or not, but I recently got this book, the man who did not die Elijah by Gordon Lindsay. And Charles talked about this in our Revival History series, but essentially where this doctrine began to be widespread. And I think this is where Gordon, where Hobart Freeman would have picked it up. Up until William Brannum's death, many people, I'm assuming in Gordon Lindsay, in the way he's writing this, many people

believe William Brannum was the return of Elijah as predicted they say in Malachi chapter 4. They had separated three from four, not knowing it's a scroll where there are no chapters, and said that chapter 3 talks about John the Baptist, chapter 4, talking about the Elijah of this day, the last day, right before Armageddon.

Well, when he died, how does that work? Everything that was supposed to happen with Malachi 4 didn't in their version of understanding of Malachi 4. So Gordon Lindsay writes this book, saying that Elijah is going to come as a spirit on the corporate body of the church.

The very last chapter of this is basically taking everything that they believed in William Brannum, now apply it to the body of believers, which if you follow that to its logical conclusion, knowing that there is a cult hierarchy, he's literally talking about the elite members of the spiritual body, not the rank and file.

So this began to be trained in the Christ for the nation's institute. It started to be widespread throughout the, they had these deliverance conferences. He was holding with Brannum, deliverance conferences turned into training centers, turned into entire courses where you could learn deliverance, how to practice it.

And the idea is that you are a deliverance minister because you have that Elijah spirit in you, and as that Elijah spirit, it is a little small portion of God. So it's tied so deeply to the manifested sons of God.

Like you said, it does go all the way back to Kenyan, but Brannum is the one who systematically took all of these heresies and all of these apostasy. Steve Montgomery calls it the converging apostasy.

He takes all of these different numbscal beliefs and he combines it into one doctrine. And then what happened was not everybody attributes Brannum, but they started building on it, and they're all building in different directions.

So each person has their own version of the doctrine. Hobart Freeman has one and he assumes it's unique and it's his, but it's really built on the foundation that was laid by others. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website William-Brannum.org. On the books page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top.

And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support.

I had read other charismatic literature, and I thought, well, I read this over there, but maybe Brother Freeman has a pure version of it. And I think every group... who thinks their group has the better version that's been purified of its excesses or unscriptural parts previously.

Hey, you mentioned, I mean, there's just a lot we could talk about here, and we will continue this over the months, but you mentioned Dominionism earlier.

That is another thing that, yes, definitely comes under this same heading and Hobart talked about it a lot. And here's the context in which you would hear that in Dr. Freeman's ministry. And you heard it also in the other charismatic ministers of that era that God wants us to reclaim or to take back what Adam lost in the fall.

This was a big subject for Dr. Freeman, and it was a big subject for all of those other charismatic ministers. So they would take us back to the creation Garden of Eden narrative in Genesis, the first three chapters, and show us that according to scripture, Adam was meant to fill up the earth, to subdue the earth, and to have Dominion over it.

Over the animals, over the fish, over the birds, over everything, and I've heard sermons where they walk you through the intelligence that Adam had seen by virtue of the fact he was able to name all of the animals.

And here you have basically in their view a little God. That's why it all ties in together. This is pre-fall Garden of Eden. So Adam has not sinned. He doesn't have any iniquity or unrighteousness in his character.

He was created in the image of God, holy and righteous and upright, and until he disobeyed, he remained in that state. And so what they say is, what happened is Satan wanted to control the world.

And so Adam was the God, small G, but the God of this world, Satan wanted to become the God of this world. And so he came, he tempted Adam through his wife, Eve, and was able to usurp, control the world.

And now what we have to do, we Christians, we've got to take the world back from Satan. We've got to reclaim our dominion and reclaim all of our rights. I don't know if people have seen this, John, but I know they can either go online and find a YouTube clip, but you could put one up there for them also if you want to.

Where Kenneth Copeland has several times recently said that he has a divine mandate from God, that he's going to live for 120 years. He even gives a date of his death and it's like 20, 56 or something like that.

I would love for people to see this guy. I mean, somebody like Mr. Copeland is just, he's a mentally unstable, unbalanced person. But this 120 years, we've talked about this before with Dr. Freeman.

Freeman quoted Deuteronomy 34 all the time too, saying, now Moses, his eye was not dim. Neither was his natural force abated and he lived 120 years. You know, why can't we live 120 years?

Well, if you're going to reclaim, if you're going to reclaim what Adam lost, just go back and get Methuselah, 969 years. Why stop with 120? That is puny. That is puny. That is faithless to stop with 120 years.

Go back and claim more than that. But Hobart used this same idea as the basis for just extreme views. So we have another clip from Dr. Freeman's message entitled, listen to the very title of it and you know where this is going to go.

Recovering our dominion and rights taught in the glory barn in the mid 1970s from the 40-minute and 24-second mark through the 42-minute and 19-second mark. You claim it to work. Then the second thing you got to do is command that you serve or to release it.

Satan, you see, you've got to be specific here. If you want a Vega, yellow, white and white hairs, you could do a little bit of that. I mean, get a little more comfort, Eric, and you spell that out and say, Satan, take your hands off.

You've got to be specific because he has all the economy. He has everything in this world bound. And you have to command him to release it. I do it every time I claim anything of any amount, like a car, of any size.

After claim with the second step, I always describe it to the devil and tell him to take his hands off of it. I haven't failed yet, friends. He must be hearing it. I wish I could claim that was original with me, but another brother, prophet in the church, he tells us that the Lord directly envisioned and by all the voice told him to do this.

He said, I, in my ministry, I was praying for money. And he says, oh, I desperately needed it. So much money, like $130, many years ago. And he said, I've just been begging away for this money.

He's a faith teacher. He says, the Lord spoke to me in all the voice, said, what are you praying to me for? It isn't up here. It's down there. It's yours. Satan has it bound.

Claim what you want. Tell him to take his hands off of him. And he said, I did it and got it right away. And of course, he does that all the time, so do I.

You have to command the devil. He said, you sir, he doesn't own a thing. It's yours. The word says it's yours. Thank you, guys. If you don't want them, of course, don't ask for it, but we're talking about people who want to get to work and back without having to hitchhike and be out of debt and don't think God's mad if they don't owe everybody in town.

Most people think God's displeased if they walk in health and prosperity, but he isn't. He's happy when you start releasing those areas of your life to him so you can spend your time in spiritual matters.

There's a wonderful thing, not to have to take any thought for these things. What we hear in this clip is Dr. Freeman saying now the second thing that you've got to do in order to get your dominion and rights back, and you can listen to the message yourself and hear what the first thing is, but the second thing what you have to do is you've got to tell the devil who is a usurper.

He's a thief. He's a counterfeiter. He's a usurper. He's stolen these things from you. You've got to tell the devil to take his hands off of what rightfully belongs to you, and he said, and you have to be specific.

So if you want a yellow Vega with white side walls, that was way back in the day when he used that as an illustration for the car someone would be claiming. He said, if that's what you want, you've got to name it specifically, tell the devil to take his hands off of it.

And then Hobart goes on to say, you know, I believe just for luxury vehicles, but he said, that's one thing I always do. Whenever I claim a vehicle, then the second thing I do, you claim it.

The second thing you do is you announce to the devil, this does not belong to you. This belongs to me. Take your hands off of it. Yeah, John, to me, that sounds like sorcery and witchcraft to even talk like that. The way you get a luxury car is you get a job and you earn enough money and you go purchase the car.

You don't claim it. There's no such thing as claiming vehicles. And even more ridiculous would be to claim it and then think that the devil has his claws on your car. And so you have to go tell him, take your hands off of my car because that car belongs to me. It's just the most fairy tale, infantile, juvenile, ridiculous kind of stuff.

And yet these big time ministers believe these things, I guess they believe them. Hobart believed them. Talk these things and we're able to invent so many other people that this is the right way.

Hobart also had a couple of other things he liked to talk about. He found, look at these verses that he found. He found Job 22 and verse 28. Oh, have I heard sermons on this? You know, buried right in the middle of the book of Job, which is another difficult book to interpret. You know, it really is. You've got Job speeches. You've got the speeches of his three friends.

How would you like to interpret verse? by verse, all the chapters of the book of Job. That's a difficult book. But people like Hobart weren't concerned with that. They were just looking for proof text.

If I can find a little candy cane, a little nugget, buried in here, I'll pull it out. Job 22, 28, thou shalt also decree a thing and it shall be established unto you. So Hobart would teach, there's a higher level of faith than just claiming something.

You don't claim that you just decree it as a fact. You just decree the car is now mine or you decree the cancer is now gone. You say, I decree that. And as soon as you decree that, it will be gone.

And I'll give you one more, John. And I know you're itching to throw your two cents in. There's even a higher level than that. And this is Isaiah 45-11. I just want people to realize, this is not the way we do Bible study.

This is not the way you go. This is not the way you learn God's word. By being able to memorize a couple of verses and be completely unaware of the context or anything that it could even possibly be saying besides what your false minister has told you that it's saying.

So in Isaiah 45-11, we have concerning the work of my hands, command ye me. Hobart even has a message, it's on the L-18 and it's called commanding faith. So here, because you are God, because you are God, you don't have to ask God for anything.

No, you actually just command God. And Hobart said, I don't, he said, don't come up here and argue with me, that's what the text says. He always says, that's what the text says. And it is what the text says.

But come on, do we really think we can command God the Father to do anything? You can try, do you think he's gonna do it? I doubt it, seriously. So you've got claim it, then you've got decree a thing and it will be established unto you and then you've got a higher faith, commanding faith and that's just command God to go do what you want him to do.

There are a thousand places that I could go with this. Seriously struggling to try to contain it into one podcast. I think I'm gonna go back to the second Adam theme because I think that's key to understand and people don't really grasp how significant that is.

So you mentioned, he would say the text says this, I've heard random say a thousand times, I've heard Hagen say it, all of these people will say the text says this, does it not?

And they give you the phrase, and sure enough, if you go look at the Bible, that phrase is there, but they're not telling you a, they've twisted the phrase, b, they have supplied you with enough loaded language and indoctrination, but that phrase no longer means what that phrase says, all the way down to the second Adam.

And so what Paul is saying, he's talking about the resurrected Christ, he's saying there's the first atom and then from that we have all of humanity. Then he's saying Christ is the second atom with Christ you get your resurrected body. So with the second atom you're going to have your resurrected body which gives you, you know, you're purchased into the blood of Christ and you become the body of Christ.

So Paul is saying nothing more than this, but this little God's manifested sons of God language overloads this to where it means that like atom, one of the things that's overloaded in this is dominionism.

Adam had dominion over the kingdom until the fall. So what he's trying to say is Christ will give you that same dominion. That's a loaded language that's into this context. Essentially it's trying to say that we're all humans are little gods in embryo form and God's going to birth all of the embryos of little gods. Jesus is going to birth all the embryos of little gods with this passage.

But essentially what they're teaching is that because you have the ability to speak and your commands that you speak will come to pass. It means that you are like God tying it back to John one in the beginning was the word the word was with God.

They'll use the spoken word the ram of whatever it is to overload that passage all the way back to where atom was in dominion over the fish of the sea. I can't remember the exact verbage. You probably know it, but there's a dominion passage from Genesis that they tie this to.

So all of these different elements of loaded language are behind that statement does not the text say this to the person who's never been indoctrinated. They look at that text and they're like well no that text obviously doesn't say that but to the person who's been manipulated and indoctrinated they can't see it any other way.

And until you strip out all of that programming we you and I had this conversation right before this podcast. There are so many things programmed in your heads when you're in these movements that you read a passage and it triggers a million different thoughts none of which really even are close to resembling the passage.

It's like you started off saying here John that the phrase is actually there and that is what is so dangerous but that's the old proof texting cherry picking method. The phrase is always there generally that literal actual phrase that they quote I mean they quote it perfectly command ye me.

They'll shout decree a thing and it shall be established unto you so we're assuming he's talking to me when it said you shall decree a thing. I mean what you just have to make all of those assumptions but of course those assumptions are made for you by the minister.

It's what makes these groups so dangerous and it's what makes any form of Bible study. besides regular chapter by chapter, book by book, exegetical studies. What makes it so dangerous? Because the Bible's a big book.

You know, there's a couple of million words in it. There are thousands of verses and tens of thousands of phrases in it. It's a big book. It's not like it's a little 14 page pamphlet.

There's a lot of information and a lot of material in there. And you have to take your time and you don't get this overnight to work your way through the Bible and it comes by reading the Bible yourself and studying it yourself.

But you can take these passages that we've talked about like Isaiah 45, 11 or Job 22, 28 and go read the context after hearing this podcast and you probably won't come away with little God's theology.

It's just once you start with something, you need more passages to support it. And that's what these guys do. So I'm gonna go one final direction with this, John, because this is what Hobart love to do with all of this and this word gets really weird.

But he had a message entitled, listen to the title of this one, sonship faith. In this message, he tells, he said, now if this makes it any easier for you guys to receive this, God gave this whole message to me by prophecy.

So that actually make it harder for me to listen to it. I would be more inclined if he had worked several weeks or months on some passages exegiting them. But if you're of the charismatic, super spiritual, mystical mind, then to know, oh God just gave him this message by prophecy.

I remember we did an earlier podcast where Hobart said, God told him that if you ever need a message, just sit down at your typewriter and you can prophesy a message and type it out and then go preach it to the people and that he did that many times.

And this is one of them, sonship faith. Okay, it was delivered. This is an old message in 1969. It's given in the basement of a home in Muncie, Indiana. You know all this because you listened all of his messages and you learn all of these tidbits.

The family's name was Mitchell. It's mostly a group of women, but they're in the Mitchell's basement in 1969 in Muncie, Indiana. And we're gonna hear seven minute, 42 second through nine minute and 12 second mark.

Friends, it's being done whether it's just a little bit of faith. The fog, the wind, the waves, the tornadoes, the hurricanes. When people take Christ literally here, they can change and control the weather when they have to and it's being done.

I almost say, why don't you try it sometime, if you try it, it will hurt, you have to believe. Why could give your count sprints? I mean, I've heard people tell, and we have taken authority over fog, and I frequently take authority over snow in driving I have to.

I haven't yet ever had to pull outside the road in a snow storm. You just clears up. You say, well, you drove out of it. Will you put any explanation on it you won't? You've got to pick it. Instead of getting thinner. So, this is simply what he tells you, wind and tornadoes and storms are spirit sprints that cause them, and you take authority. You notice he rebukes them. He didn't pray, Lord, can you help us here, we're about to sink. He just commanded it to cease. He was dealing with the devil. If you know who to deal with, then you get caught

in that fog going six to mile an hour on the road. You start rebuking that fog. Don't start praying to the Lord to get you outside of the road. There's no time to pray. There's just time to know what to do. So, wow, this was a big theme of his in the early 70s. He wanted to talk a lot about weather, that he could control weather, especially snow and fog. Of course, he gets this from the stories of Jesus with the disciples on the sea of Galilee, and the storm comes across the lake, and the apostles are all afraid, and what do we read, but that Jesus

rebuked the wind and the storm, and everything calmed down. Well, oh my, have I heard messages of Hobart about this? He said, well, look, he said storms can't hear you. He said storms are evil spirits. Bad weather, that's all evil spirits, because you don't talk to a storm. He said, that wouldn't that be ridiculous for Jesus to talk to a storm, a storm can't hear him, but an evil demon can hear him. So, he is talking to a demon storms. He says, and that clip storms are evil spirits. So, again, he takes an isolated event in Jesus' life in earthly ministry. He

flattens it out through all eternity, makes it a normal occurrence for any Christian who, after all, is a little God, and who is to have dominion over the earth. And this person now, this believer now, is able to talk to the weather, the storm, the spirits behind the storms, and get these evil spirits to obey him. And, you know, on many of Hobart's early tapes, he'll say, yeah, we were driving through the fog, and we just rebuked the fog, and it parted.

And I can remember, as a teen... As you're trying to do that stuff myself, it didn't work. And when you hear Hobart, because he's your minister, you just think, somehow things don't work with me, but they always worked with him.

And he gives a couple of examples where they're driving 55, 60 miles an hour down the highway. He and his wife, June, to a meeting and they're all locked in with fog and he just rebukes the fog.

Well, there is another explanation that is you just drove out of it. You know, again, we have no empirical way to prove any of these things. It's just his word. I believe the account that happened with Jesus on the Sea of Galilee because that's in my Bible.

But I don't believe the stories that Hobart tells of his life just because they're on his cassette tapes. And he gives other stories. He said, I've had to take control over snow, especially snow living in Northern Indiana and rebuke it so they claim and rebuke and command and decree.

And they're just a group of little gods walking around being able to control the weather. I do remember early on, not when I was 17, but maybe by the time I was 19 or 20 or 21, you know, I was reading my Bible and I would come across passages like Paul going to Rome in Acts 27.

And that was a terrific storm that could have easily taken everyone's life. And Paul never rebuke it. And that just always stuck in my mind. And of course, we got the most famous storm in the Bible.

And that's the storm with Jonah, the prophet. To me, it looks like God sent that storm that was not an evil spirit behind that storm. With Paul's storm, it was just a storm. I mean, it's just weather.

I'll tell you a personal testimony here. I'll never forget John one time when I was a minister up in Vermont. We lived in a little house in Paulette and I was sitting out on my front porch and there was a terrific lightning and wind and thunder storm that came through.

And I went out and sat on the porch, front porch to listen to it and to watch it. And I must have been reading in the book of Psalms and I must have been in Psalm 29.

And Psalm 29 is a famous nature Psalm. And what it does is it calls the thunder and everything happening in the storm, the voice of the Lord. That's what Psalm 29 is all about.

And I knew that by that time in my life. And I went out there and just witness this is not an evil spirit. This is the power of God, the thunderstorm. The Psalmist said this is the voice of the Lord.

And something else that I wondered about, they hope aren't talked about rebuking the rain, making the rain stop, you know. because you need to do something. If people want to go on their own and hear a story of Hobards, he did a series of tapes early, early on on the gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12.

And on his tape, on the gift of faith, the gift of faith, he tells an embarrassing account. He was willing to be a little more honest back in those days. He would never have done this later in his life.

But he tells on this particular tape that just the day before, they had had a wedding that he had officiated at and that everyone had gotten wet. And it's obvious from the way he tells the story that they had claimed that it wouldn't rain and they had rebuked the rain.

And he just said he appreciated everyone getting wet with him because it obviously didn't work. And he's told other stories where he said he rebuked the rain in the last thing he grabbed before he left the house with his umbrella.

And then he said, well, you know, because I acted in unbelief, you know why my prayer didn't work against the rain because I carried an umbrella. But I remember, I guess maybe in my early 20s, I was just barely smart enough to figure this out.

I wasn't very bright at all, but I was barely smart enough to come up with this thought in my mind. Well, now wait a minute. What about the farmers in Northern Indiana who desperately need the rain?

I literally had this thought, what's more important? You're wedding day and that there be no rain or the farmers and their crops that they really do need rain. And little thoughts like that would come into my mind and it would begin to make me think, I think there's something about this weather stuff.

I don't think that we have any authority over the rain or the fog or the snow or anything like that. I think that's just part of this whole product and offshoot of little gods, dominion, decree a thing, commandee me, have the faith of God, sonship faith, we can have the same faith that Jesus had and we can demonstrate it by controlling the weather around us.

You know, I'm actually glad that you triggered a lot of those memories with what you just said because I've totally forgotten about this, but it is part of this theology. Brenham had a series of sermons called Why Cry Speak and it was referring to a specific passage in the Old Testament.

And the model that's being presented is that because you have the word of faith, the spoken word, the rain of whatever this is, you have the power to execute the commandments of God by your voice, your voice is the command.

And then that morphed into different flavors of series of sermons. One of them is speak to the rock. And in those sermons, he goes into the weather. He starts talking about when the disciples were tossed by the storm, they went to the rock.

They went to Jesus. And then a audible voice spoke and the waters calmed. The weather calmed. And if you listen to what he says just in that one or two paragraphs, it is biblical.

Jesus is speaking and the thing happens. But when you listen to the broader context, it's that you too can become like this. You can speak, you can command the weather. He doesn't explicitly say you can command the weather like Hobart did.

But he's giving the framework that allows other ministers to build upon it so that they can go to that conclusion. So that's the perfect summary for what you're describing. It isn't that Hobart was copying Brandham so much as he was building on that foundation that was laid.

And so was everybody else who in this charismatic weirdness of these little Harry Potter sorcerer gods. But that's where this ended up. You literally had people that if you were to give them a magic wand and have them say, I can't even expect them, pleturnum, whatever it is that Harry Potter says, it's no different than what Harry Potter is doing.

And yet they're condemning Harry Potter and all of the sorcery that you see on TV. What they're not telling you is what they're doing is really pretty much the same. They're just using the name Jesus instead of a wand.

Yeah. And what I would just hope people do is forget about the fact that you can find that phrase somewhere in the verse, just read your New Testament. And do you really see anybody going around trying to control weather?

I mean, look at Paul on his trip to Rome in Acts 27. Anybody who had faith and should have been able to control a storm, I would vote for the Apostle Paul. And evidently, it never crossed his mind to tell the storm just to stop.

So when I read just good historical, biblical narrative that's in my Bible, I go, wait a minute, there's something not right. I think they pull verses out of their context, trying to make them mean something they really don't mean.

Absolutely. And for me, the final thought is this, if you watch the Harry Potter movies or read the books, I've seen the movies, I've actually not read the books, but the power that Harry Potter wields with that wand is actually greater than what they can actually do if they try to command the weather.

So in the end, it's for nothing, right? So anyway, there's so much more I could say, like I said, I'm having trouble containing it. So maybe next time we'll go deeper or in the future we'll go deeper.

So thank you for doing this. Yes, thanks, John. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branum.org.

From more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle and Audible.

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